The Internet is a ubiquitous medium of communication in most parts of the world. The emergence of the Internet has opened a new forum for the creation and placement of advertisements (ads) promoting products, services, and brands. Internet content providers rely on advertising revenue to drive the production of free or low cost content. Advertisers, in turn, increasingly view Internet content portals and online publications as a critically important medium for the placement of advertisements.
In online marketing and online advertising, a target audience is a specific group of people within the target market at which a product or the marketing message of a product is aimed. For example, if a company sells new sports shoes for boys (target market) the online advertising may be aimed at the parents (target audience) who take care of shopping for their kids. Generally, a target audience may be selected based on factors including: age group, gender, marital status, etc. The target audience, however, may be different from the successful audience, which include the group of users who actually performed the preset action after viewing the marketing message. Different organizations and different people involved in the online advertising industry may tag different audience with different conventions. As a result, the tags for different audience segments from different organizations may be nearly impossible to understand by the advertisers.
Because the different format of the audience tags are generally complicated and arbitrary, the existing online advertisement systems are not capable to provide advertisers a human understandable summary without human intervention. Thus, there is a need to develop methods and systems to help advertisers to understand more about their audience.